Jeff Bezos has a support yacht for his yacht with its own helicopter pad

When the billionaire Amazon boss sails on the $500m Koru, the Abeona comes too

Henry VIII had Thomas Cromwell to order his affairs and Samuel Johnson had James Boswell trailing in his wake. The same is apparently true of superyachts, which now arrive with an assistant carrying the bags.

As Jeff Bezos’s gigantic sailing schooner was sighted cruising the Mediterranean, beside it appeared the largest support boat ever. Abeona, apparently named after the Roman goddess of outward journeys, is a 246ft motor yacht able to cruise 5,000 miles on a tank of fuel. It has a helicopter pad, storage for all manner of boats and marine gear and a crane to winch them in and out of the water. There is also room to sleep 45. Yet it is a number two — an understudy to Koru, the three-masted, $500 million schooner launched from a yard in the Netherlands this year.

Reid Stowe, an artist and seafarer who made the longest ocean voyage in history, of 1,152 days, aboard a schooner he built that is now docked in New Jersey, said the support boat, known as a “shadow”, would be “something they just have fun with and maybe it has the little toys on board”.

Such boats generally stow all manner of playthings, including four-wheeled motorbikes, supercars and submarines. But Stowe was staggered by its size. “It’s a mighty big boat,” he said. “I don’t know why they want it that big.”

Abeona was the second largest yacht ever built by Damen Yachting, the Dutch company that began work on it in 2019. During construction, the identity of its owner was kept secret. Now Bezos and his partner, Lauren Sánchez, have been seen flying by helicopter to the Abeona and taking a launch from there to Koru.

Sánchez is a helicopter pilot and the builders of the Abeona had been asked to give it a helicopter hangar, capable of housing her aircraft, with an elevator that would lift it to and from a landing pad on the hangar’s roof at the stern. This would be required aboard the support vessel because Koru, with its traditional lines and its three masts, could not support a landing pad.

Koru, the world’s second largest sailing yacht at 417ft, has won praise for its classic design from around the world. “It’s beautiful,” Stowe said.

Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez

He suspected that despite its size, Koru might be less capable of staying at sea for a long time, because it had so many systems that required maintenance. But he appreciated its smooth lines. “It may be state-of-the-art but he didn’t try to make it look like something funny, or like a spaceship,” he said.

Koru is said to require a crew of 40, with room for 18 guests. Don Anderson, a former captain of M5, the world’s largest single-masted sailing yacht, said Koru would be “one of the most ecological yachts out there, with its sails and also with the technology that will be aboard” — a gentle carbon footprint that could perhaps be made heavier by the enormous motor yacht puttering along behind it.

On a sailing yacht, “you’re more susceptible to the elements,” Anderson told The New York Times. “But you can leave California, and once you get past the Catalinas you can basically surf downwind all the way to Hawaii. All you need to do is run with the waves.”

Koru represents Jeff Bezos’s embrace of the trappings of ultra-wealth

When Koru arrived off Cannes for the film festival, dwarfing the yachts of other billionaires, it was noted that the prow bore a sculpture of a voluptuous mermaid who looked a lot like Sánchez.

Brad Stone, author of Amazon Unbound, who was the first to identify Koru and Abeona as Bezos’s boats, has argued that they mark the end of a transformation in the public persona of one of the world’s richest men.

In the early years of Amazon, he had appeared wholly preoccupied with the company, riding a Segway around the office. He lived outside Seattle with his wife and four children and guarded their privacy. He showed little interest in the usual diversions of the super rich, such as collecting sports cars or art.

But by the late 2010s Bezos’s friend Jamie Dimon, the JP Morgan chief executive, told the author that “Jeff was like a kid in a candy store. It was all new to him. He was so focused on Amazon for a long time. Then he gradually became a citizen of the world.”

Source: The Guardian